ABSTRACT
Is the Chinese working class being (re)made in the crucible of a powerful alliance between Communist authoritarianism and flexible capitalist accumulation? One astute student of labor movements worldwide predicts the emergence of a world-historic labor movement in China, comparable to the peasant revolution that ushered in the Chinese Communist regime.1 Others have emphasized how diabolical sweatshop conditions in the workplace have combined with staunch state repression of independent unionism by the Chinese regime to produce a seemingly unlimited supply of docile and cheap labor.2 To this labor question of the Chinese transition – i.e. how are worker control and resistance organized, with what effects on labor as a political subject? – this chapter offers an alternative answer to those mentioned above. My basic argument is that despite formidable institutional odds, Chinese workers do resist the violence of marketization, or more precisely the commodification of labor power. But they have not built a national class movement. Instead, the Chinese regime’s development strategy of “decentralized legal authoritarianism” has generated patterns of labor activism that are localized, legalistic and cellular. Conflicts between labor and capital have become the wellspring not so much for class struggle but for workers’ quest for citizenship.
